Tony Blair: The Musical/Tony! The Blair Musical

Revisiting our recently departed PM

You knew it was coming! More colourful than Derry Irvine’s wallpaper, more expensive than a peerage, but a bit less fictional than the Weapons of Mass Destruction. Yes it’s the musical version of old Pinocchio’s political life. Or two versions, in fact, by two young companies, White Rose Theatre and lo Theatre.

But neither are as hard on the former PM as you might think. Chris Mundy, musical director of Tony Blair: The Musical sees Blair’s story as having a tragic arc, moving from the poster boy of ‘97 to the untouchable of post-2001. ‘Satire is a quite reductive form of art, so we’re not going completely down that road. There are a couple of caricatures, like Bush and Blunket, but Blair and Brown are very fully developed characters; it’s quite warm about these two, gentler than you might expect. There’s a number called “Oh What a Lovely War on Terror”, but it’s as much about the system that creates these situations and characters, as it is about Blair.’